HANDSOperators & owners
The best seat in rideshare, and the shortest shift.
Two ways in. Drive one of ours and keep most of the fare, or hand us your Tesla and take a cut without ever picking up a passenger. Either way the FSD subscription, the commercial cover, the charging and the tyres are ours to sort out, not yours.
Everything on this page is the deal we intend to open with, published early so that anyone thinking about it can pull it apart before it matters. Nothing here is an offer of work, none of these rates has been paid to anybody, and no insurance is in place. If you want to be first in the queue when it is real, the form at the bottom is the place.
OPTION A · OPERATOR
Drive one of ours
You show up, take a car off the charger, run your shift, put it back. No car payment, no insurance bill, no tyres, no depreciation, no cleaning.
- 72% of every fare, paid weekly — the intended split
- Nothing to buy, nothing to rent, no weekly fee
- Shifts from four hours, booked a week ahead
- 40 hours of paid training before your first passenger
OPTION B · OWNER
Put your Tesla in the fleet
Your car works our shifts with our operators. You never meet a passenger, never clean a seat, never answer a phone at 11pm.
- $750 a month, flat, whatever the car earns — the intended rate
- FSD subscription paid by us while it's in the fleet
- A commercial policy that names rideshare, bound before any car works a shift
- Charging, tyres, service and cleaning all ours
- Pull it out with 14 days' notice, no penalty
The money
What it actually pays
Projections with the costs left in, because the version with the costs taken out is how rideshare recruiting earned its reputation. Nobody has been paid any of this yet — these are the numbers we are planning against, and the first thing we will publish when we are running is how far off they were.
If you drive one of ours
| Per driven hour | UberX in your own car | HandsFree operator |
|---|---|---|
| Gross fares | $26.00 | $31.00 |
| Platform / company cut | −$7.00 | −$8.68 |
| Fuel or charging | −$4.10 | $0.00 |
| Insurance, share of | −$2.40 | $0.00 |
| Maintenance & tyres | −$1.80 | $0.00 |
| Depreciation | −$3.60 | $0.00 |
| Take-home per driven hour | $7.10 | $22.32 |
The UberX column is our own estimate from public rideshare-earnings figures and IRS-style running costs, not a survey we ran; the HandsFree column is a projection, not a payroll record. On these assumptions a 24-hour week of driven time would come to roughly $2,320 a month with nothing to deduct from it. The $26 vs $31 gap is not a higher fare — we intend to price against UberX, and booking direct should come out a little cheaper. It is a better mix and less dead time: booked airport runs and scheduled shifts instead of waiting for a ping, so more of every hour is a paid mile.
If we drive yours
| Per month, per car | Sitting on your driveway | In the HandsFree fleet |
|---|---|---|
| Paid to you | $0 | +$750 |
| FSD subscription | −$99 | $0 — ours |
| Your insurance | −$160 | $0 — ours |
| Charging | −$45 | $0 — ours |
| Tyres, service, cleaning | −$55 | $0 — ours |
| Depreciation | −$290 | −$620 |
| Net to you | −$649 | +$130 |
Putting your car in the fleet does not make you $750 a month. It makes you about $130 a month, because we're going to put around 45,000 miles a year on a car that would otherwise do 12,000, and that extra wear is real money coming off what it's worth.
What it genuinely does is turn a car that costs you $649 a month to own into one that pays for itself, and takes charging, insurance, tyres, servicing and cleaning off your plate entirely. If someone offers you a percentage of the fares instead and doesn't mention depreciation, that's the number they're hoping you won't work out.
Depreciation assumes a $33,000 car: about $290 a month at 12,000 miles a year, and about $620 a month at the 45,000 we'd put on it. That works out at roughly 29¢ a mile privately and 16.5¢ a mile in the fleet — the per-mile figure is higher when the car barely moves, because a car loses value by getting older whether you drive it or not. That's the part that makes fleet use less punishing than it first looks. They're still estimates: run them against what you actually paid.
On our own projections a partner car is roughly break-even — slightly more expensive per month than a car we own outright. We would do it because it adds capacity without capital, not because it's a profit centre. If someone tells you their owner programme is generous to both sides at this scale, ask to see the arithmetic.
This job has a visible end date. When Tesla certifies the software to run without a person in the seat, an operator's role changes completely — probably into remote support and fleet operations, at a desk, for fewer people.
We think that's two to four years out and we could easily be wrong in either direction. Anyone who drives for us will be told this before they sign anything, and the longest-serving operators will get first refusal on the ops roles. Nobody is going to find out from a press release.
Training
Supervising is a different skill from driving.
It is genuinely harder to watch a car drive well for six hours than to drive it yourself. Boredom is the enemy, and boredom is trainable.
Most people can drive. Very few people can sit with their hands on a wheel that's moving by itself and stay sharp enough to catch the one moment in four hours where it gets something wrong. That's the skill we will hire and train for, and it's why we won't just hand someone a key.
- 10 hours, no passengers. The car, the software, what it does well and the specific places it doesn't. Every hard junction in our area, driven repeatedly.
- 6 hours, supervised by a senior operator. You drive, they sit beside you, they call out everything you didn't notice.
- 20 hours of failure drills — half the course. Deliberate disengagements, sudden hand-backs, a phantom brake with a passenger aboard, what to say while it's happening. Taking over has to be a reflex rather than a decision, and that takes repetition.
- 4 hours on passengers. How to explain what the car is doing without either frightening someone or overselling it.
$18/hour while you train, and if you don't pass you keep the money.
- 25+, licensed 5+ years, clean record for 3
- Comfortable saying "the car got that wrong" out loud, on the record, every time it happens
- Genuinely interested in the technology — this job is unbearable if you're not
- Available for at least two four-hour shifts a week
What we're not looking for
- Anyone who wants to prove the car can drive without them
- Anyone who'd hide an intervention to keep their numbers clean
- Maximum hours — we cap shifts at six for a reason
Owner terms
What happens to your car
Written plainly, because the version buried in a contract is where these deals go wrong.
What we pay for
- FSD subscription, every month it's with us
- Commercial insurance naming you as an additional insured
- All charging, home or Supercharger
- Tyres, brakes, wipers, cabin filters, scheduled service
- Interior detail weekly, exterior wash twice a week
- Any damage that happens on our shift, whoever's fault
What stays yours
- The title, the loan, the registration — all unchanged
- Your own use of the car outside its scheduled shifts
- The right to pull it out with 14 days' notice, no fee
- Access to its telemetry, including everything we publish about it
- Depreciation. This is the real cost and we're not going to pretend otherwise
The insurance line, the additional-insured naming and the damage undertaking on this page describe the terms we intend to offer. They become real when a policy is bound and we can show you the certificate — not before. Do not hand anybody a car, ours included, on the strength of a website.
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Hardware 4 or newer | Older computers can't run the unsupervised software when it lands. Putting an HW3 car in the fleet buys a dead end. |
| 2023 or newer | Interior condition is most of the rider experience, and battery health matters over a 46-hour week. |
| Under 80,000 miles | We'll add roughly 45,000 a year. Above this the maths stops working for you. |
| Model 3, Model Y or Model S | Rear legroom and boot space. A Model X is welcome but the doors are a liability in a car park. |
| No lien restrictions on commercial use | Some finance agreements forbid it outright. Check yours before you talk to us, not after. |
Early interest
Start the conversation
One form for both. This is not an application for a job that exists yet — it puts you at the front of the queue for when it does. We'll come back within two working days either way.